Tuesday, 30 April 2013

This has been a busy few weeks in the Salesforce developer community; mobile dev week arrived at short notice and a week later it's the Salesforce Customer Company Tour with the attendant Dev Zone, which is the main attraction of the event if you are a developer. As I've been or am getting involved in a number of these events, I thought I'd write a short blog about them.

Intro to Force.com

This took place on 11th April at the Salesforce offices in Tower 42. Lead by Frances Pindar (@radnip) with assistance from myself, it was a couple of hours or so session to introduce the next wave of Force.com developers to the platform, working through the exercises in the Developerforce Force.com workbook in a group environment. The advantage to using the workbook is that the attendees are then able to continue with the exercises once the session is finished, given that it isn't feasible to get through the whole thing in the time allowed.

Here's a picture of everyone hard at work:

I'm planning on running another one of these sessions in the next few months, so if you're near London and are interested in learning more about the Force.com platform, stay tuned.

Mobile Developer Week Meetup

As part of Salesforce Mobile Developer week, the London Salesforce Developer's Group had a meetup at the new T'Quila offices above Smithfields.

Rob Woodward of Salesforce gave us an overview of the new Mobile Packs and demonstrated a todo list application based on the Angular JavaScript framework.

I was up next, and demonstrated a couple of applications that I'd built using the Salesforce mobile SDK and Apache Cordova under the heading of "Ticket to Ride". These consist of a ticketing application, that allows users to pull down tickets that they have purchased onto their mobile device, stores them in the Salesforce smart store and allows offline access to the ticket details and a QR code. The companion application is a driver app that scans the ticket, confirms it is being presented for the correct service and updates the ticket with a used indicator and timestamp. Force.com provides the object storage and the applications access this via the Rest API.

The powerpoint presentation for this talk can be downloaded here. If you'd like to see it in action, come to the BrightGen stand at the Salesforce Customer Company Tour and I'll be happy to show you.

Just to prove I'm not making it up, here's a photo from the event courtesy of @Anup:

Salesforce Customer Company Tour

On 2nd May the Salesforce Customer Company Tour comes to London. My company, BrightGen are a Platinum Sponsor this year, so we'll have a big stand and plenty of people to man it. This event incorporates a Dev Zone and I'll be giving a Developer Theatre session on Building a mobile web app with HTML5 and JQueryMobile, from 4:15 to 4:45 - hopefully I'll see some of you there. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here.